How to start watching at 4K right now

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While the television manufacturers will undoubtedly spend the next few years trying to one-up each other in order to make the most amazing 4K “Ultra HD” television, we consumers get to sit back and marvel at the ever-dropping prices for these impressive sets. If you find yourself ready to make the jump to 4K soon, there are more than a couple of options available now to get 4K content to your television.

Of course, 4K Ultra HD televisions are designed with significantly higher pixel count than standard 1080p ones. Just for reference, the resolution of your current television is probably 1920×1080, while these new televisions are 3840×2160. This means that images will be sharper, and you’ll be able to watch many movies and shows at the same resolution in which they were captured.

In order to watch anything in 4K, you’ll need hardware capable of delivering the higher resolution videos and then the content in the appropriate resolution to take advantage of the screen.

We’ll assume for the time that you have a 4K-capable TV or display, since that’s pretty essential here. They are starting to be available, though most are still expensive. One that is actually affordable is the Seiki SE50UY04, a sub-$1500 4K television.

4K-capable hardware

You’ll find that almost everything available right now does not support 4K. It’ll be a while before your cable provider is pushing 4K channels to your set, so for now you need hardware that you’ll connect to your new TV that is specifically labeled as supporting Ultra HD. You’ll find these labels on certain Blu-ray players and PC graphics cards, but there are a couple of things that offer native 4K support now.

Outside of this list, you will find hardware that claims to upscale to Ultra HD. This means that the hardware will take HD content and make it look better than if it were just regular 1080p, but not quite as good as if the content were actually 4K. There are a number of Blu-ray players now that support this kind of upscaling, as well as Nvidia’s Shield portable gaming console. The quality of the upscaler being used will have a lot to do with how noticeable the difference between Ultra HD and upscaled 4K really is.

4K content libraries

There’s a another issue with 4K content, and that’s the lack of video currently available in 4K. This will be less of an problem with new movies and TV shows, but there’s very little previously existing content in 4K. Sony has pulled their Ultra HD content together into a media player that has everything on a hard drive, and allows you to buy new content as it becomes available and store it on the drive.

There’s also a new 4K section on YouTube that allows you to stream 4K content as long as your Internet connection can support it. As more content becomes available, it’s likely that video services such as Netflix and Hulu will make content available in 4K, but currently these options do not exist.

If you have a Blu-ray player capable of delivering 4K content, you can watch discs that have the “Mastered in 4K” label on them. If you have a camera that can take pictures larger than 8MP is size, they will look really great on a 4K screen as the display can actually show you the detail you captured in the shot.

There aren’t a ton of personal use cameras that record in 4K yet, but there are plenty of prototypes out there. There’s also Timescapes, the first movie to be shot, edited, and sold as a 4K file. In time there will be more content available to users, as well as publishing companies willing to go back and remaster their older catalog into 4K, but for now your choices are a little on the slim side.

Is it worth it to go 4K?

The cool thing about switching to an Ultra HD television now is the knowledge that this format is going to be around for a while. The cost of televisions are coming down every couple of months, and the amount of available content and supported devices are growing every day. If you’re looking at a 4K TV now, you’ll have a television that you aren’t likely to feel the need to replace anytime soon.